Thursday, January 8, 2009

Wire: Obama Expected to Openly Welcome Gays into US Military

According to an AFP news report written by Daphne Benoit published Wednesday, the U.S. armed forces under Barack Obama is expected to give homosexuals the same welcome as heterosexuals.

President Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," policy allowed gays to remain in the military so long as they did not reveal their sexual orientation.

Obama has pledged to change the current law.

"The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited," reads an entry on Obama's president-elect transition Web site.

A recent poll of active duty servicemembers by the Military Times points to Obama's lack of leaderships experience, particularly when it comes to matters involving the military, to explain U.S. troops' general pessimism and wariness of the president-elect.

Democratic lawmaker Ellen Tauscher from California is the lead sponsor in the House of Representatives of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act (MREA) which would replace "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

A poll of some 2,000 active duty military taken in December by the Military Times found that 58 percent opposed the policy of non-discrimination against homosexuals. Twenty-nine percent said they approved the change.

However, lack of support is no reason stop a change of the law, opponents said.

One opponent also compared the issue to racism. "There will always be some people who will prefer the status quo, but people who preferred segregated units (banned in the U.S. military in 1948) didn't leave the military by and large," notes Aubrey Sarvis, director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization promoting the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Read it: Obama era expected to end taboo on gays in US military

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Liberalism is the Default of Pop Culture

Writing in Monday's NRO, Mark Steyn observes if the non-political sphere in the U.S. is permanently left-of-center -- the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else -- it's simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

Andrew Breitbart, whose news sight is routinely linked by Matt Drudge, gets to what's really at stake:
If conservatives don't figure out popular culture soon, the movement will die a deserving death.
Read it.

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

AP: Al-Qaida No. 2 Blames Obama for War in Gaza

The Associated Press reported that al-Qaida's No. 2 leader lashed out at President-elect Barack Obama in a new audio message Tuesday, accusing him of not doing anything to stop Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip, according to an intelligence monitoring center.

In the comments, which were posted on a militant Web site and obtained by the SITE Monitoring Service, al-Zawahiri described Israel's actions in Gaza as a "crusade against Islam and Muslims" and called it "Obama's gift to Israel" before he takes office later this month.
"This is Obama whom the American machine of lies tried to portray as the rescuer who will change the policy of America," al-Zawahiri said, according to SITE. "He kills your brothers and sisters in Gaza mercilessly and without affection."

[. . .]

"At the time when Israeli planes drop their bombs from the air, he closes the borders with his forces so that the plan of the killing of believers in Gaza is fulfilled," al-Zawahiri said, according to SITE.
Read it.

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Monday, January 5, 2009

Change Indeed: Scandals Move From Republican Hilarious Sexual Hijinks to Democrat Corrupt Pay for Play

Say farewell to funny foolishness and hello to downright scary criminal corruption.

Writing online today at the NBC New York Web site, reporter Sara K. Smith says for many years, Republicans represented the party of salacious homosexual bathroom sex-trysts while Democrats confined themselves to more workaday financial improprieties, such as storing massive collections of marked bills in their freezers.

Smith says you'd have been hard pressed to pin a pay-for-play scheme on a Democrat because they were too unimportant: they just didn't have any political influence worth selling.
Now Democrats have reclaimed the White House and both parties of Congress, so of course they're obliged to pull double duty in both sexual and political scandals. Let's see, they've got the sex scandals pretty well covered: who can forget such luminaries as Eliot Spitzer, Patron Saint of Hookers; Tim Mahoney, the proud Florida Democrat with multiple mistresses who replaced the Republican with the "drinking problem"; the lizard-tongued humanoid adulterer John Edwards; and last but not least, America's greatest mayor and sexiest texter, Kwame Kilpatrick.

A recent flood of news about Democrats doing improper, non-sexual stuff for favors means they've got the political side of scandals covered, too. Let's review:

-Senate seat salesman Rod Blagojevich

-Congressman Charlie Rangel, whom the New York Times is constantly catching in the middle of one seedy-looking situation or another

-Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton, who passed legislation to help a developer shortly before her husband accepted that developer's $100,000 donation to his presidential library

-And the latest: the portly and affable Bill Richardson, who couldn't be Secretary of State because he would have been murdered, personally, by the Clintons, so instead he settled for Commerce Secretary before he got roped into a grand jury investigation. Apparently some brilliant financial company that advised Jefferson County, Alabama into near-bankruptcy was also hired to work its magic on the state of New Mexico after it donated 100 grand to various political action committees formed by Bill Richardson.
That's the change we need ... right.

Read it.

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